Category: oil wells

‘Soma are investing heavily ($40m spent on seismic work) in looking at oil and gas extraction in Somalia, so it was a bit of a set-back, to say the least, when their “capacity-building” efforts – funding infrastructure in the relevant Ministry – were alleged to fall under the Bribery Act 2010, and this led to a fraud investigation by the UK SFO. The investigations, as investigations do, dragged on, and Soma brought these, somewhat ambitious, proceedings to get an order telling the SFO to stop them.’

‘A High Court judge was wrong to override an exclusion clause in a complex contract for the hire of an offshore drilling rig, as the parties were commercial equals and the wording of the clause was sufficiently clear, the appeal court has ruled.’

“Damages for trespass occasioned by an oil company drilling underneath another party’s land were to be assessed on the basis that the right to drill for oil was a compulsory acquisition under statute and, therefore, any additional value of the right of access attributable to the oil extraction scheme was to be disregarded.”

“A party, under licence from the Crown to search for, bore and obtain oil, which drilled and used pipelines to extract the oil from land without the grant of permission by the owner of the paper title in exclusive possession of that land, committed a trespass, although such trespass was purely technical in that no interference was effected on the landowner’s use or enjoyment of his land, nor did the latter have any rights to the oil which belonged exclusively to the Crown and its licensee.”

“Access to land to remove oil vested in the Crown from beneath the subsoil, without obtaining access rights from the owner of the land, amounted to an actionable trespass entitling the landowner to compensation, which was to be assessed on the basis of what would be fair and reasonable between willing parties.”